Through decades of war and neglect, silt deposits have cut the capacity of the Dahla Dam's reservoir and a $50 million Canadian aid project has failed to provide year-round irrigation to thousands of desperate farmers.

SHAH WALI KOT, AFGHANISTAN—Heavy snow falling high in the Hindu Kush lifts the spirits of farmers far to the south as they scrape out a living in the Taliban’s desert heartland.

The harder winter pounds the distant peaks, the happier they are.

Their fate rides on the rivers of meltwater that flow south each spring, winding through a parched land, filling a network of canals that bring new life to dust-blown furrows.

Kandahar’s dirt-poor farmers feel blessed this year: winter was harsh in the mountains, so spring brought lots of water to give their crops a good start. But now the water is running low as the scorching summer heat rises.

And the farmers worry that most of God’s fleeting gift will hurry past them along the province’s main irrigation system, as it has for decades, leaving crops to shrivel under a punishing summer sun.

Canada had committed $50 million to cleaning up and repairing the irrigation network and the dam that supplies it, but Afghan farmers and officials complain that the project wasted money, taught villagers to expect handouts and lined corrupt people’s pockets.

And after all those costly mistakes, the outdated Dahla Dam’s reservoir is so full of silt that it can’t hold enough water to get crops through the driest months.

“I just want to say to Canadians that if you pave our canals with gold, what can we do with it?” chided Meerab Zakirya, 52, a Mandisar village canal manager. He has to answer to about 1,000 angry Daman district farmers when water runs out.

“If we don’t have water, our main problem is not solved,” he added, both hands clenched to the arms of a white plastic patio chair. “Me, I don’t need money. I want real work. If you want to do something, do it the right way.”

Similar complaints echo across the thousands of desert farms that Canada has struggled to irrigate, into crumbling schools Canadian aid money built, and through the halls of a deeply corrupt justice system Canada helped support despite good intentions.

There are two cardinal rules of development aid: projects must be closely monitored to make sure money isn’t wasted or lost to theft and corruption; and they should be sustainable, so projects survive after foreign experts move on.

After a month-long investigation in Kandahar’s war zone, it’s clear that Canada failed on both counts, tarnishing a legacy that thousands of Canadian troops and civilians died or suffered debilitating wounds trying to build.

Since 2002, 158 Canadian troops have been killed in Afghanistan. Four Canadian civilians also perished: two aid workers, a diplomat and a journalist.

Canada spent $1.65 billion on reconstruction and development in Afghanistan from the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001 through last year. Ottawa has committed another $300 million from 2011 to 2014 for development projects and humanitarian assistance.

Since the Harper government gave up the fight in Kandahar province and pulled Canadian combat troops out last fall, uncomfortable questions remain.

While the Harper government has cut non-military aid to Afghanistan by more than half since last year’s pullout, she added, “I must say, some Afghans hardly care, knowing the poor performance of Canadian aid projects.”

“My research shows that basically, Canada’s Kandahar venture was a failure, in terms of security, stabilization and development of Afghanistan, and this failure cast a shadow over the earlier recognition gained from Canadian financing of successful Afghan national programs,” Banerjee said.

In late March, the month the last CIDA official left Kandahar, Prime Minister Stephen Harper took a triumphant tone in his final report to Parliament on Canada’s Afghan mission.

The 59-page report boasts of “a strengthened security environment” even though insurgents remain a powerful threat across Kandahar province and attempts to start peace talks with the Taliban have failed.

It also claims “significant progress” on what the government identified as Canada’s three signature projects and six priorities for Afghan aid in June 2008.

The Dahla Dam and irrigation system topped the list, followed by a $12-million plan to renovate or build 50 schools and a $60-million program to immunize seven million children against polio.

Ottawa also set six priorities, led by a push to enable Afghan security forces “to sustain a more secure environment and promote law and order.”

At the time, acting foreign affairs minister David Emerson said the aim was “to leave Afghanistan to Afghans in a viable country that is better governed, more peaceful and more secure.

“What is new is that we will significantly concentrate Canadian efforts and our resources on those areas most likely to help us reach that goal,” he said.

Four years later, Kandahar’s government is still corrupt and dysfunctional, the Dahla Dam and its irrigation canals are only partly restored, the schools Canada built are plagued by shoddy construction.

And, Banerjee says, “Kandahar is still called the world’s capital of polio.”

While Harper’s final report acknowledges that the task of rescuing Afghanistan from more than three decades of war is far from finished, it reads like a Canadian version of declaring victory and going home.

“For the first time in our history, the Canadian military engaged in a prolonged counter-insurgency conflict at the same time as Canadian civilian experts provided leadership in governance and development,” it said.

“Through the inevitable setbacks faced, we kept moving forward,” it continued. “Our resolve to help Afghanistan has never wavered. The losses we endured will never be forgotten.”

Yet Afghans give more thanks to God’s will than Canadian aid for what little progress they make each day.

Just up a potholed dirt track from the Dahla Dam, about 35 kilometres north of Kandahar City, an elderly farmer squats barefoot in the dun-coloured desert.

He scrapes at the earth with a rusty sickle, taking out the weeds that suck precious water away from his poppy plants.

The last poppy petals are falling, which means Jan Mohammed, 63, will soon scratch his plants’ green seed pods with a small, razor-edged tool.

The milky latex that oozes out will turn to a brown, sticky resin, the opium that Mohammed must sell to feed himself and his family for another year.

“We thought the Canadians would increase the height of the dam a few metres, which would help improve the water capacity, but it never happened,” he said.

“This dam is quite an old one, built by Americans about 50 or 60 years ago. With the passage of time, it will stop working. The real solution is a new dam, whoever builds it, if it’s Americans or Canadians or our government.”

In a wilting desert breeze, against the rush of water spilling over nearby waterfalls, it sounds like a passing dream.

What looks like a mistake sustains life for 80 per cent of the people in Kandahar province.

The river rises in central Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains, giant footmen to the mighty Himalayas.

Then the Arghandab gathers strength for its 560-kilometre journey, flowing southeast and then turning southwest to the edge of the Dasht-e-Margo, or Desert of Death, where the borders of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan converge to a sharp point.

Before the decades of ruin, the Helmand River was also a major source of hydroelectric power, its waters turning the turbines of the Kajaki Dam.

Morrison-Knudsen, the engineering company that built the iconic Depression-era Hoover Dam, erected the Dahla and Kajaki dams in the early 1950s, when peace, an enlightened king and faith in western technology brought the modern world closer.

In those days, Afghanistan was the world’s largest exporter of dried fruits, famous for sweet raisins, pomegranates, nuts and other fruits of farmers’ labour.

During decades of fighting and neglect, silt piled up in the Dahla Dam’s reservoir and canals. Dam gates and other mechanics broke. And the once reliable source of water year round slowed to a trickle after the spring melt passed.

Many farmers switched from crops that couldn’t survive drought to a more hearty plant that is much less thirsty: the poppy.

Soon that was Afghanistan’s biggest cash crop.

The United Nations says opium production increased more than 15-fold from 1979, the year the Soviets invaded, to 2002, the year after U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban and Afghanistan was engulfed in a new war.

Farmers began growing opium across vast parts of the country in the 1990s and the harvest peaked at 4,565 tonnes in 1999, during Taliban rule, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

Yearly opium harvests and huge, hidden stockpiles that keep prices from falling too low have made Afghanistan the world’s biggest source of heroin, and poured millions of dollars a year into the insurgent war machine.

Banerjee, then CIDA’s chief in Afghanistan, visited the Dahla Dam area in 2004, when southern Afghanistan was still relatively peaceful, but the window of opportunity for large-scale development work was starting to close.

Farmers told Banerjee that if the dam couldn’t be replaced, its height should be increased to hold more water.

Increasing the height of the dam’s 50-metre retaining wall by five metres would reverse the effects of the silt deposits that have cut the reservoir’s capacity by 40 per cent, said Sher Mohammed Atai, an Afghan engineer who heads the provincial government’s Arghandab Irrigation Rehabilitation Project.

Banerjee said she proposed to CIDA’s program desk that a Canadian team visit the dam, weigh the options and launch a feasibility study into the best of them.

“I received no response from CIDA and, obviously, no team was sent out as I had requested,” Banerjee said.

Canadian experts didn’t seriously study the dam until after 2006, Atai said.

In July 2008, former international development minister Bev Oda invited Canada companies to bid on contracts on the Dahla Dam project.

“Once the repairs are completed by 2011, the Dahla Dam will provide a stable water supply to Kandaharis, and its irrigation systems will increase the agricultural productivity to benefit all Kandaharis,” Oda said in January 2009.

She announced that Quebec-based engineering giant SNC-Lavalin and consulting firm Hydrosult had won the contracts totalling $50 million. SNC-Lavalin bought Hydrosult a year later.

(RCMP officers raided SNC-Lavalin’s Montreal headquarters this spring as part of an investigation into corruption allegations spanning at least five countries, including India and Bangladesh. There has been no official statement that Afghanistan is among the five. The company has denied the allegations, but its CEO, Pierre Duhaime, resigned in March. The following month, the RCMP charged two company officials, both Ontario residents, with corrupting foreign officials.)

Sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a whiteboard, Atai vigorously sketched the Dahla Dam, the locations of several new flow control gates and 77.5 kilometres of restored canals.

Around $500,000 of Canadian aid money also built his agency’s headquarters, where Atai has a large, nicely furnished office — a rare comfort for a Kandahar provincial official.

Atai said he asked the Canadian Embassy in Kabul months ago for a detailed accounting of how the $50 million budget was spent. He is still waiting.

CIDA spokesperson Katherine Heath-Eves declined to provide details on how the money was spent “because this information is considered third-party information under commercial privacy.”

Leslie Quinton, SNC-Lavalin’s vice-president for global corporate communications, did not respond to repeated requests for answers.

Rahim Rahimi, Kandahar province’s economy director, thinks $50 million should have been enough to increase the dam’s height, but too much money was lost to indirect costs, especially payments to private security firms.

Banerjee said she heard similar complaints from Afghanistan’s former minister of rural development Ehsan Zia, who visited the area several times before, during and after Canadians worked there.

“Ehsan Zia told me that most funds were spent on contractual payments to SNC-Lavalin and their housing, home-leave travels, payments to security firms and even protection money to villagers,” Banerjee said.

“If use of paid labour and expensive equipment brought improvements and attained the objective of irrigation water flow in the dry months, the farmers would have welcomed Canadian efforts,” she added. “But without the objectives having been attained, we have to agree that CIDA funds were wasted.”

The high cost of relying on private security, instead of using foreign and Afghan troops, to protect dam workers was clear to the Canadian government even before it announced the project was set to begin, according to a foreign technical consultant’s report.

“Security was proving to be a major issue and a considerable portion of the USD 50 million allocated for the project by the GoC (Government of Canada) would fund a private security firm,” said the 2009 report to Afghanistan’s Ministry of Energy and Water.

Two years ago, Canadian security officials overseeing the Dahla Dam project fled the country following a tense dispute with armed members of Watan Security Management, operated by a cousin of President Hamid Karzai.

As reported by the Star’s Mitch Potter in June 2010, the guns hired to protect the project actually turned on each other in a hair-trigger confrontation.

The U.S. has offered to spend $120 million to fix the Dahla Dam on the condition that Karzai’s government, which loses a lot of the little it earns from taxes to corruption, kicks in $25 million, Rahimi said.

“As I understand things, the central government is not very interested or eager to work in Kandahar. Maybe they will finish it, maybe they won’t,” Rahimi said with a shrug. “Who knows?”

But CIDA is finished with the Dahla Dam.

“Our current priorities, which have a nationwide focus, do not include plans for funding further components of the Dahla Dam,” Heath-Eves said.

Atai, the Afghan engineer, has no doubt that the water level in the Arghandab’s irrigation canals will soon drop to almost nothing

“In a month, the phone will start ringing,” Atai said. “The meerabs (canal managers) from all the districts will be calling me: ‘Oh, director, we don’t have water. We need water!’

“Forty or 50 people will be after me. Every day, meerabs will be fighting with each other.”

An air of defeat, and all the suffering that’s likely to storm in with it, is looming over Kandahar as its people watch foreign troops leave and billions in aid money dry up.

“If they don’t finish (the dam), I will be dead,” Atai said, laughing off a real risk. “Because I promised all of the people: ‘You can be sure that they will increase the height of the dam and we will provide more water for you. Please be quiet!’

“Now, they are waiting for this project. If I know 100 per cent that no Americans, no Canadians want to do this project, for me, my career is not important. I will go sit in my home.”

Still, he’s reluctant to criticize Canadians. At least they tried to do something, he said.

“I’m thankful to them. If they hadn’t done this little work, who would have? It would be nice if they had stayed,” he added.

Zakirya, the village canal manager, is far less forgiving.

Zakirya does a slow boil as he fumes over how Canada handled Kandahar’s water crisis. Canadians could have fixed the dam, he said.

Instead, they brought in expensive machinery and paid Afghan villagers to clean canals that they could have maintained with nothing but picks, shovels and the sweat of their brows, he complained.

“In the long run, it’s just useless,” he scoffed. “Millions of dollars were spent uselessly. In the past, we had a culture of volunteerism, but they even destroyed this culture. When we ask them to clean the canal, they say: ‘Let’s ask some company to clean it for us.

“They are just making our people dull and lazy and want us to be dependent forever. They are not making us independent. We can’t always rely on others. These days we don’t have honesty. Nobody is honest.”